By Bruce B. Brugmann
Shinny during his years as chief of police in Rock Rapids, Iowa, during the l950s. This was the card I had in my billfold when I heard about his death. He was technically “Shene” but he was Shinny to me. Shinny approved of my pronunciation. His last card omitted a key word from his earlier cards: “lover.”
The funeral services for Elmer (Shinny) Sheneberger, the central figure in the famous Halloween caper of 1951, were held Friday March 20 in the Congregational Church in Rock Rapids, Iowa.
I got word from Marj and retired CPA Jim Wells and Shinny’s nieces Audrey and Margo Wallace that Shinny had died on Saturday March 14 in his suburban mobile home in Phoenix, Arizona. He had fallen the day before and was found 20 hours later. He was terminally ill with cancer but hanging on.
Shinny was born and raised and lived his entire life of 92 years in this little northwest Iowa town. He was what every small town needed and cherished: an authentic good-natured character who went on generation after generation. He was somehow always there, when you needed him and sometimes when you didn’t. When a politician came to town, the word would get around that Shinny was briefing him at the Lane Cafe. When the Hermie Casjens gang rolled a loaded boxcar across Main Street, twice, on Halloween eve in 1951, Shinny was on duty as chief of police and had to move the boxcars off the street.
I never told Shinny who was involved in the incident and he never asked. Finally, years later, I gave him the full story. He laughed and said, “Let’s drink to it.” We did and did all through the years. When he would call me at my office in San Francisco, he would say, “I want to speak to Bruce. This is his parole officer in Rock Rapids.” Shinny had a wonderful way of operating on Halloween: he would just come upon the roving Casjens gang, and would just shine his car lights. We would scatter and he would move on, never making an arrest. In fact, I don’t think he ever made many arrests, that night or on any other Halloweens. His was humane law enforcement, Rock Rapids style.
Shinny did roll the boxcars back off of Main Street, but we never knew exactly how he did it. He explained in detail at our 55th class reunion last June in Rock Rapids. We invited Shinny to come after Dave Dietz and I got firm assurances that the statute of limitations had run and we were free to talk about the incident. We surmised that Shinny had gotten everyone out of a nearby dance at the Community Building to move the cars. No, he said, he rousted people out of the nearby movie theater under threat of “arrest” and pressed them into action, twice.
Shinny was quietly generous. He owned a farm near town and he told me that he was would be willing it to Camp Foster, the YMCA camp on nearby West Okiboji Lake where many of us went to summer camp. “I always thought highly of the boys who came out of that camp,” he told me. “And so I thought that would be a good place for my farm.”
Through the years, Shinny would say to me, “Bruce, you and I have got to get along together. We’re going to be together for a long, long time.” I never could figure out what he was talking about until I was out visiting the Brugmann plot at the Riverview Cemetery, the picture postcard cemetery atop a hill overlooking the Rock River. I noticed that the plot next to the Brugmann plot was the Sheneberger plot. As usual, Shinny was right.
Click here to read Halloween 1951: Fast times in Rock Rapids, Iowa, from the Bruce Blog archive.
Here is the email note I sent to my classmates on our email tree for the Dream Class of 1953 (16 boys, 16 girls, now many less):
Shinny’s funeral will be tomorrow (Friday) in the Congregational Church in Rock Rapids.
I ordered a bouquet of red tulips for the service from the Flower Village, with a note “from the Brugmann family and the Class of 1953.” I assume I don’t need to go over the details once again about Shinny’s connection to our class and his involuntary participation in our class activities and the famous Halloween incident of 1951.
Shinny was a longtime member of our church. He always wanted to live as long as Henry Rahlk, also a member of our church, who lived to be 102. Shinny, alas, only made it to 92.
I always enjoy buying my flowers from Flower Village, which once was in the old Brugmann’s Drugstore building. It’s now across the street in the old Bernstein department store building. Each year on Memorial Day, I phone in to Flower Village and buy potted flowers for all the members of the Brugmann plot at Riverside Cemetery. That’s both sets of my grandparents (Ethel and C. C. Brugmann, founder of Brugmann’s Drug in l902; and Allie and A.R. Rice, a Congregational minister in several small Iowa towns); my mother and father (Bonnie and Conrad Brugmann, who was a partner with my grandfather in the drugstore from the Depression onward); and my aunt and uncle (Mary and Clarence Schmidt, a veterinarian from Worthington who was the family representative in World War II.) I hope to end up in the Brugmann plot with my wife Jean.
And the Village people put the flowers on the plot, always well positioned and blooming nicely. Shinny’s family had the next plot and he would always take pictures of my potted flowers and send them to me with a friendly note about “staying in touch and getting together someday.”
And then I would always call the former Janice Olsen to remind her to pick up the flowers and take them to her home in Rock Rapids, once the home of her aunt and uncle, Edna and Harold Jongewaard. Harold was a funeral director in Rock Rapids for many years and buried almost all of our family in our plot. Janice’ s mother was Elsie Olsen, Clarence’s sister, and the Merl Olsens had a family farm out near Edna that I used to visit when I dated her in our junior year.
I didn’t mean to ramble on so long, but Shinny’s death reminds me once again of how it was and still seems to be back there in Rock Rapids, the best little hometown in the country. There are lots of good connections and lots of good memories, but they grow dimmer and dimmer.
So long, Shinny. I’ll be seeing you soon. B3